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This book shows you how to produce letters that lead to interviews and job offers. Focusing on the key principles of effective communication, the authors examine the six most important letters every job seeker needs to write.
Andre Eglevsky was a ballet dancer and a dance educator.
Background
Andre Eglevsky was born on December 21, 1917 in Moscow, Russia. He was the son of Yevgeny Eglevsky, a colonel in the White Russian army, and Zoe Obranov. During the Russian Revolution, Mrs. Eglevsky and her two children fled to Constantinople, and then to Sofia, Bulgaria, where Andre developed a lung disease, necessitating the removal of a rib. Warned that her son would not survive the cold Balkan climate, Mrs. Eglevsky finally settled her family near Nice, France.
Education
In order to strengthen the eight-year-old boy, Andre's mother had him take ballet lessons in Nice with Maria Nevelska, a graduate of the Imperial Ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, who claimed to have recognized her young pupil's promise after the first week. Nevelska later arranged for Eglevsky to audition with Michel Fokine, the choreographer for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Fokine was impressed with the boy, who was encouraged to study in Paris with other renowned dancers from the Imperial Ballet, including Lubov Egorova, Mathilde Kchessinska, and Alexandre Volinine. What academic schooling Eglevsky received was arranged around these lessons.
Career
In 1931, while visiting Egorova's studio, Leonide Massine, a former member of the Diaghilev Ballet, saw the fourteen-year-old Eglevsky dance. Massine's choreographies dominated the repertoire of Colonel de Basil's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and Massine was so impressed that he arranged for Eglevsky to make his professional dance debut as a member of its corps. In six months he was dancing lead roles for the company.
In 1933, Eglevsky went to London with the Ballet Russe, where he, Massine, and Alexandra Danilova, also a member of the troupe and his first famous partner, studied with Nicolas Legat, a former director of the Imperial Ballet. In Heritage of a Ballet Master, Eglevsky noted that his work had so improved under Legat's system that he left the Ballet Russe in 1935 to continue studying with the master.
Eglevsky performed with several dance companies in short engagements before joining Fokine, now directing the René Blum-Michel Fokine Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in London, in 1936. He danced the lead parts in various Fokine ballets, such as Les Sylphides, Prince Igor, and Le Spectre de la Rose, and created the roles of Leader of the Jesters and Leader of the Demons in his Don Juan. In 1937, Eglevsky returned with Massine to the United States, where he had toured with the Ballet Russe in 1934.
He became a permanent resident there and an American citizen in 1939. He soon left the Massine troupe to dance with the American Ballet. Then he was appeared in Great Lady, a Radio City Music Hall musical comedy.
Eglevsky was in great demand as soloist and virtuoso, and he was especially famous for his pirouette turns, his beats, and his suspended leaps.
He performed often for the Ballet Theatre, now the American Ballet Theatre, creating such roles as Paris in Helen of Troy by David Lichine, who shared Eglevsky's Ballet Russe training, and others in Massine's Mademoiselle Argot and John Taras's Graziana. For Ballet International he created the title role of Massine's Mad Tristan (Tristan Fou) and choreographed his own Sentimental Colloquy in 1944. Eglevsky appeared in New York and Europe in almost all the classic roles, often to considerable acclaim. Edwin Denby, a New York critic of the time, raved about his interpretation of Albrecht in Giselle in 1945, and Eglevsky also danced the prince in Swan Lake, the title role in Apollo, and other male leads in The Nutcracker and Don Quixote. During these years and throughout the 1950's he also partnered some of the outstanding prima ballerinas of the day, including Alicia Alonso, Melissa Hayden, Rosella Hightower, Nora Kaye, Tanaquil LeClercq, Alicia Markova, and Maria Tallchief.
In 1951, Eglevsky joined the New York City Ballet, under the direction of George Balanchine, and stayed there until his retirement in 1958. One source calls these years perhaps his most creative, a remarkable comment about a dancer at the end of his dancing career. He danced in many of Balanchine's new creations, including Capricioso Brilliante, Caracole, and Western Symphony, and he was especially noteworthy in Scotch Symphony.
In 1952, while still associated with the New York City Ballet, he danced in Death of Columbine with Melissa Hayden in Charlie Chaplin's film Limelight, and in 1953 he performed with Maria Tallchief at the White House. In 1944 the Eglevskys bought property in Massapequa, Long Island, New York, and settled there permanently in 1950. In 1955 they turned their garage into a dance studio, and began to teach ballet. The school prospered, thanks to his well-established reputation as a dancer, and soon the garage space proved too small.
By 1957 he decided to build a studio in the area, financed by a series of dance engagements with Tallchief. After his retirement from the New York City Ballet, Eglevsky commuted three days each week into the city to teach a men's class at Balanchine's School of American Ballet. His own last performance was on the Bell Telephone Hour on Sept. 30, 1960.
In 1961 he founded the André Eglevsky Ballet Company in Massapequa, which generally performed at local events and festivals. Eglevsky became increasingly involved with the dance company, creating his own staging for such full scale works as Cinderella, Coppélia, and The Nutcracker. During a tour of the company's annual performance of The Nutcracker, he died in Elmira, New York. André Eglevsky was considered by many dance critics to be one of the greatest classical dancers of his generation. Undoubtedly the key words here are "classical" and "generation. "
Eglevsky was trained almost exclusively by émigrés from the Russian Imperial Ballet, and he was famous for his breathtaking, meticulous technique. The ballets in which he was most effective were ones that showed this effortless mastery to advantage, and the famous choreographers of his day - Fokine, Massine, Balanchine - also products of the Russian school, were able to combine his classical technique and their imaginations into very successful presentations. It is therefore not surprising that at the end of Eglevsky's life he was still restaging the great classics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for his own company.
Nor is it surprising that in the last year of his life he collaborated in a "remembrance" of Nicolas Legat, who had created four personal dance classes for the young dancer in the mid-1930's that Eglevsky says later became his "bible. " It is the precise timing of Eglevsky's career as student, dancer, and teacher, however, that makes him a notable figure. Having been taught in the Russian manner by the very creators of the Ballet Russe companies, he then spent a long performing career dancing with people like Danilova and Tamara Toumanova, from this same background, and Kaye, Hayden, and Tallchief, who were not Russian-trained.
In the early 1950's, the young Jacques d'Amboise used Eglevsky as his style model. Later, when Eglevsky was a teacher at Balanchine's school, he began to work with an even newer generation of dancers, like Mikhail Baryshnikov, to whom he taught the role of Spectre in Fokine's Spectre de la Rose, as Fokine had taught him. Moreover, some remarkable American dancers, such as Fernando Bujones, Sean Lavery, and Patricia McBride were given early performing opportunities with Eglevsky's dance company.
Thus, Eglevsky formed a kind of living link between the old Imperial Ballet School of prerevolutionary Russia and some of the most famous dancers in America in the late twentieth century.
Andre Eglevsky met his future wife in the American ballet, ballerina Leda Anchutina, whom he married in 1938 when he was appearing in Great Lady, a Radio City Music Hall musical comedy. The Eglevskys had three children, and their daughter, Marina, also became a dancer.